Join Hugo Drochon, author of Elites and Democracy, as he dives into the theories of democracy and makes us take a peek behind the curtain to ask who really rules it? Who is an elite? And what roles do they play in our expectations of government? Drawing from thinkers like Mosca, Pareto, Michels, and more, Hugo challenges our frameworks for democracy and argues that recognizing the realities of political power can help us better understand how to move a republic forward.
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
BEN KLUTSEY: Our guest today is Hugo Drochon. Hugo is a professor at the University of Nottingham. He’s a political theorist and a historian of modern political thought with interests in Nietzsche’s politics, democratic theory, liberalism, and conspiracy theories. Hugo, thanks for joining us today.
HUGO DROCHON: Thanks so much, Ben. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Adjusting our expectations of democracy
KLUTSEY: Great. So, my first question to you is: I read this book as a humble interpretation, or maybe a modest interpretation, of democracy, because some have a very grand, utopian view of democracy leading to some grand end. And you’re saying, “No, it’s just switching from one elite group to another.” How is that?
DROCHON: To a degree, yes. There is a desire to lower expectations slightly, because I think when our expectations are too high, this is when we get disappointments with democracy, and that can lead to rejection of democracy altogether. So there is a desire to lower expectations but not to get rid of expectations altogether. I try to occupy that middle space. As you say, there is a focus on elites and the changing of elites, it’s not just that elites have changed and that’s it, and it’s all very cynical. I want to say that in this change of elites, there’s a possibility for change, if not to achieve full democracy.
It depends on what our definition of democracy is. If full democracy means that the people truly rule, maybe in the abstract there’s something to strive toward, but in reality, is that really what democracy, or at least the political systems we live in today, really are? But it doesn’t mean we can’t strive toward them, or that we can’t have perhaps something closer to democratization rather than democracy—democratization understood as higher participation, more distribution, as opposed to the inverse, perhaps oligarchy, or “oligarchization.” I don’t even know if that term actually exists. That’s where the elite becomes even more closed up, and there’s even more concentration of wealth, resources, or whatever it might be.
So there’s definitely a desire to change our focus slightly and think about it differently. And maybe this is more in the academic world than in other places, but it’s to reintegrate the question of who rules. We have rulers. We have rule. By saying that there are elites is to focus on that.
But I hope that’s the beginning then of a discussion: What type of rulers do we have? How do they come to power? What’s their form of legitimacy? And what’s the ratio between the rulers and the non-ruled? That’s a much richer picture, and perhaps a bit more realistic than trying to avoid that topic or conversation altogether.
KLUTSEY: Do you worry that people will be a bit defeatist about the endeavor?
DROCHON: I suppose it also depends on who’s going to read it, right, and there may be a couple of different publics. Obviously, it remains an academic book, so some of it is addressed to the university and some of the theorizing about democracy that you might have in the university. There are different theories of democracy here, and my attempt is to contribute to that discussion with my own perspective, adding a dimension that I sometimes think is overlooked.
So, yes, even if there’s a slightly deflationary idea, I don’t mean to say that we should give up altogether.
Ben, you kindly mentioned that I’d worked on Nietzsche’s politics before, and Nietzsche has this nice line that I try to take up as my own in the book, where he talks about how there can be a pessimism of strength. As I say, it’s not just pessimism where you give up. There’s something pessimistic, perhaps, about this understanding of democracy as never being fully achievable, yet that could be the starting point of strength and not a weakness. We have something to focus on now, so we can identify something and we can work with that. And having these abstract ideals as we know throughout history, the disappointments of “unfulfilled promises of democracy,” have led people to reject democracy altogether.
Here, instead, we should say, “Well, democracy isn’t as idealistic as we might want it to be. But nevertheless, we can affirm this.” There’s that famous Churchillian line, right? It’s the least-worst form of government that we know. But that could be a positive thing. It’s the least-worst form, therefore it’s the best form that we know, because it doesn’t have all the problems that the other ones have. We can affirm that positively. It doesn’t need to be just a defensive thing. I want it to be affirmative.
And then, also, if we say this is the big question we have, the big focus point we should be looking at, namely that even though we live in a democracy, there are still elites and we need to think about that. By focusing on that and identifying what are the challenges of modern democracy, just simply seeing it, I think can be liberating. It’s like, “Okay, we know what the big challenge is—that’s the big challenge. We still have elites. We need to think about that.” But that’s the start of the conversation then that we can have about what we do about it.
Obviously, I’m not claiming we can ever get rid of them, and maybe that’s not desirable either. Full replacement is perhaps not desirable either, because elites may still have a role in stabilizing the regime and filtering through certain desires as they may be expressed.
But if we focus there, we can say, “Well, now we know what we’re dealing with, and that recognition itself can be liberating.” Then we can ask other questions we sometimes don’t ask as much as we should: What type of elites should rule? What’s their relationship with other elites? What’s their relationship with other types of people? Where is their legitimacy coming from?
The elite formations in different countries can be very different. The United States has a certain tradition. Even in Europe, think about the differences between the United Kingdom and France. In the United Kingdom, we often say it’s PPE, philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University, which seems to be the training ground for the political class—and not just the ruling class, but the ruling class more generally, whether in journalism, theater, or whatever it might be.
That’s obviously very different from the French system, which I know quite well, and which is more focused around places like Sciences Po and the École nationale d’administration. They’re much more focused on civil-service training, a much more technocratic type of training, whereas PPE is more discursive and more in the realm of debate, whereas the French is more technocratic. So that already gives us a good sense of different political regimes, different formations of elites, and the impact then it has on society more generally.
Theories of democracy and conspiracy theories
KLUTSEY: As you know, I’m a big fan of your work on conspiracy theories. When I read this book, it seemed to me that there was an interesting link between that work and this one. I learned from you in that previous work that most or all conspiracy theories come from the cabal theory, that there’s a small group of unknown people who control everything. As I was reading this book about elites, my concern was if this reinforces the view that, indeed, there is a small group of people who actually control everything—the rule of the minorities. I guess the difference here is that this group is known, versus in a conspiratorial thinking environment you don’t really know who the elites might be, right?
DROCHON: Yes, elite theories of democracy are meant to be an alternative to conspiracy theories of democracy. And there’s an institutional reason for that. Part of my trajectory as an academic, I was hired on a research project as a postdoctoral researcher about conspiracy and democracy. So my thinking was framed within that context.
But where they interact is indeed the fact that there’s a small group of people who rule. The difference, then, is that, yes, conspiracy theories, as you mentioned, firstly, we’re not sure who they are. They’re often hidden, so you can’t identify them. They also tend to be a homogeneous group. Second, they get basically everything they want. There’s a preplanned, ordained idea, and everything that happens, not just in politics but in the economy or the environment, is part of a plan that this small group of people we can’t really identify are actually carrying out. So there’s a strong historical perspective on this, too, and this has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. The people that we do see, the politicians or whoever they might be, they’re not the real power, the power is behind them. That’s a conspiracy theory, as you say.
The differences with elites are [numerous]. You’ve already mentioned one, which is that we can see them. We know that Donald Trump is the president of the United States and perhaps one of the most powerful people in the world. He’s part of the political elite. Or even Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. He’s part of the elite. There’s no hidden power behind that.
The second point is that this elite is not homogeneous. There’s competition within this elite. There are different perspectives. There may even be different perspectives within the same camp. So it’s not homogeneous, it’s heterogeneous. There are different spheres of existence.
The final thing is that this power is not absolute. With the cabal, there’s absolute power and everything goes according to a plan. Here, you have lots of elites, even if they’re conspiring against one another, but nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen politically. There’s no predetermined outcome, and we don’t know where history is bringing us. So at least on those levels, there’s a difference.
That was the point of bringing this elite theory of democracy, to say that there’s a recognition that elites do exist, but that doesn’t mean we all have to become conspiracy theorists. We can be other types of theorists. We can be “elite theorists of democracy.”
So perhaps there’s a difference between being a conspiracy theorist and being more skeptical as to what democracy’s claims are. And maybe that skepticism is quite good. Maybe in a democracy, we should be skeptical about our leaders or rulers without necessarily becoming conspiracy theorists, which brings us into a whole other realm altogether.
Who is an elite?
KLUTSEY: Yes. Who is an elite? I think in the book you talk about how there’s a moment in history when the term was not pejorative. Now, it’s used in a more pejorative way. Who is an elite, and at what point did it transition from being non-pejorative to being more pejorative?
DROCHON: Yes, so the term elite, as we use it today, can be dated quite precisely. It was first used by this figure best known as an economist, Vilfredo Pareto. People might have heard of Pareto efficiency or the Pareto law, the 80–20 rule, which says that 20 percent of the population will always own 80 percent of the land or wealth.
Pareto—who is half French; his mother was French—at the time was lecturing in Lausanne, Switzerland. For those of you interested in economics or the history of economics, he and his predecessor, Léon Walras, are known as the Lausanne School of Economics, known for the marginalist revolution in economics. I’m not an economist, so I won’t be able to give you the full details. But basically, the idea of the law of supply and demand and finding equilibrium in the market is their theory. You can already see the link between the 80–20 rule then and what that would mean in politics.
These people in 1902 were writing at the birth of modern democracy as we know it today, different to the ancient democracy. There was also the development of modern, centralized bureaucratic parties, that didn’t really exist before, which are more loose confederations. Pareto was like, “Okay, we live in this new type of regime, not under the old regime or ancien régime.” So a term like nobility doesn’t seem to capture it anymore, because nobility has a sense of inheritance over time. Here, we have elites, but they’re democratic.
So he comes up with the term elite, and he means it as a neutral social-science term. This is part of the “beyond good and evil,” if I may say, which is that whether you agree with Napoleon or not, or whether you agree with what he did or his ideals, he’s undeniably a world-historical figure, so he’s part of the political elite. So, that’s Pareto at the beginning, and perhaps we’ll get into the different types of emphases you might have in elites.
1902 is really when he first starts using the term, and because it wasn’t used in that way before, it wasn’t used in the way we use it today. We talk about elites in all spheres of existence. As you rightly point out, Ben, if Pareto meant it as a social-science, neutral term—it’s debatable whether there were implicit normative commitments behind it, like being an elite was a good thing—it’s become quite pejorative today.
I think at least one of the moments when it becomes more pejorative, especially in the US case, is in a book written in 1956 by C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. If your listeners know the term military-industrial complex, that’s the general idea C. Wright Mills was talking about.
I have two things to say about that. One, yes indeed it becomes pejorative. The military-industrial complex is pejorative. It’s not a positive thing. That’s what he meant by the power elite. He also meant there was a link to presidential power. Obviously, this was in the context of the Cold War, when the president had become more powerful because of foreign relations. Then there was a whole industrial complex to do with the Cold War in Russia, which was cold only in the Western Hemisphere, as we often say, but very hot outside the Western Hemisphere in lots of different places, including Korea, or whatever it might be. So it becomes pejorative there.
The other thing is that it becomes anglicized. The original word with Pareto is in French. It’s with the accent: the circulation of the élites. He kept the French term with the accent. So the term was really a French term at the beginning, but with C. Wright Mills, it loses its accent and becomes anglicized in the way it is now. Most people don’t write it with the accent, apart from I think The New Yorker, which I think says more about The New Yorker than anything else.
Mosca, Pareto, and Michels
KLUTSEY: Now, you focus on these three thinkers: Mosca, Pareto, and Michels. Why did you pick these three in particular?
DROCHON: Yes, two reasons, I think. One is that they’ve been reconstructed post facto, especially in the American context, as the designation that was given to them, the elite theorists of democracy. That was a term given by some American sociologists and political scientists like S. M. Lipset and Robert Dahl. They go by different terms, also. Sometimes, because of this Italian tradition, they’re the Machiavellians, the neo-Machiavellians, or the sociological pessimists. So historically, they’ve been interpreted as a trio. Part of what I want to do with the book is to say that there’s a tendency to lump them together, but actually, if you separate them out to have different emphases, it’s a much richer picture you get.
For instance, Michels really looks at modern, bureaucratic political parties. He’s very close to Max Weber, so there’s this whole reflection on bureaucracy that you don’t get as much with Mosca and Pareto, just to give you an example.
The other thing is that they did all know each other. In fact, Mosca and Pareto, who were very Italian, had a bit of a prima donna argument about who was first to come up with the theory more broadly, who was first to have said minority always rules. And I think, to be historically fair, although both seem to have come to this theory on their own, Mosca did write a book I think in 1894 that was translated into English as The Ruling Class, but the original Italian title was Elementi di scienza politica, Elements of Political Science. That is before 1902, that I was just mentioning with Pareto, and that book was in French, Les Systèmes Socialistes, The Socialist Systems.
So they were aware of each other and wrote about each other. To add to that, Michels actually knew both of them. One of the ironies of fate is that Michels, who was German, couldn’t get a job in Germany because he was a socialist. He was a member of the Socialist Party, and Max Weber was very annoyed about this. So Max Weber helped him get a job in Turin, which is where Mosca was at the time. So he met Mosca, they were colleagues, and they used to hang out and go for coffee together.
So he knew Mosca personally. And then also during World War I, when Michels was in favor of neutrality, he went to Switzerland, where Pareto was, so he meets Pareto, too. Even though they had this prima donna argument, he seems to have been able to maintain a friendship and a relationship with both, which is to his credit. So there’s a historical reason to put them together, and then there was this term that was also applied to them.
And although I admit to historical connections, I also want to say we can see they have different emphases, different political positions, and different backgrounds. If we dig into those a bit, which is why I have those three chapters in the book, we see a much richer canvas upon which to draw, perhaps to help with our own thinking today.
Dynamic democracy
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, central to this book is the idea of the “dynamic democracy,” which is inspired by the three thinkers you write about. Can you unpack that for us? What is “dynamic democracy”?
DROCHON: Yes, so this is my gloss, if you want, on the three of them. They don’t exactly use that term or develop it themselves, but I think the challenge that comes out of their reading is that, if they’re correct that elites always rule, even in a modern setting, then exactly what does democracy mean? Sure, in the abstract it could still mean sovereignty of the people or majority rule, but the reality of the politics doesn’t seem to be really about that. It seems to be about minority rule.
So what can democracy mean, or what should it mean? Already, this is in a context in which we think about politics as having an established elite being challenged by a rising elite, and it’s a perpetual movement of challenge. So I want to put democracy within that dynamic that’s already there, and this is why I’ve come up with the term “dynamic democracy.”
The idea is to say, first, “Okay, perhaps we need to move away from democracy, not only these ideals, but also this dichotomy between either being democratic or oligarchic, and it’s a dichotomy.” I would say no. We have to think of this more along a continuum. Is a regime being more democratic or less democratic, more oligarchic or less oligarchic?
The role of “dynamic democracy” is to think about how we can put pressure on the political system to move the cursor more toward democracy, understood as more participation, more redistribution, and away from a more closed elite and perhaps a more concentration of wealth.
Dynamism, as a philosophical term, is the application of force onto something to increase motion. That’s why I used dynamism. The idea is that you have a political system, but if you apply pressure on it so that the circulation of elites can be sped up, it’s within the speeding up that you may have change. Then you may have the possibility of change that pushes a political regime in the direction of democracy.
So that’s the overall framework. That’s why I wanted to call it “dynamic.” Perhaps I can add a bit to that, too. In the book, I suggest if you want to see where true political change happens—and this is meant to be more profound than just seeing one party replacing the other, because sometimes one party replaces the other, but there doesn’t seem to be that much change. Or inversely, sometimes there’s huge change within political parties themselves.
Today, if you think about the Republican Party, the Republican Party of Trump is very different from the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan. It’s the same party, but how do you account for that change?
In the UK context, Margaret Thatcher used to say that one of her biggest successes was Tony Blair, right? She was a Conservative, a leader of the Tory party, but her policies had been continued when New Labour came into power. So there are continuities or discontinuities across or within political parties themselves. Or even you might say—I’m based in the United Kingdom—the Conservative Party was in power for a long time after Brexit, but somebody like David Cameron, who was prime minister at the time of the Brexit vote, and somebody like Boris Johnson afterwards are quite different. How do we give an account for that?
Based on reading a lot of sociological work that looks at the impact social movements can have on the political system, I’d say for there to be deeper structural change, you need a combination of three factors. One, you need something like a social movement that is putting pressure on the political system. Again, in the US case, there’s a long history on the right of the Tea Party Movement as a predecessor to MAGA. So you have a kind of social movement. On the Left, too, you have Black Lives Matter, for instance. But why does MAGA come to power in the way that one of their leaders becomes president of the United States, whereas Black Lives Matter doesn’t seem to have the same direct political impact? That doesn’t mean there’s no impact, or that society doesn’t change, but it doesn’t have the more direct political impact.
That’s because the sociological theory in this seems to line up with what the thinkers I was looking at say, too. They say a social movement on its own, which applies pressure on the political system, is not enough for change. What you need also is a part of the established elite to break off from the established elite, join the social movement or join the leadership, and take on, challenge, or overthrow the established elite.
That’s the second element, is that you need both the social movement and the elite, or a breakoff with the elite. Normally, there’s also a political institution that serves as mediation between the two. Historically, at least in modernity so far, that has been political parties. We may be moving now to other forms of mediation, but historically that’s been the case. So, you need all three. If you have all three, then you have the possibility of true, deeper structural change. If you only have one, you don’t.
Then maybe that’s one way, in the US context, of thinking about why MAGA seems to have had much more direct political impact than Black Lives Matter, because Black Lives Matter, which has had a massive impact—it’s not to deny that—but it doesn’t seem to have been taken up by the Democratic Party as explicitly by one of its presidential candidates, for instance, than MAGA and Donald Trump.
So those are the different elements of what I’m trying to say in terms of “dynamic democracy.”
Populism in a dynamic democracy
KLUTSEY: Yes, it’s really interesting. So in this description, we have to think about populism a little differently. In this context, populism is basically a process to agitate changing one elite group into another. That’s where the movement is.
DROCHON: It’s one form. It’s not the only form, but yes. Part of the book also came out as a response to what happened in 2016, between Brexit in the United Kingdom and the first election of Donald Trump. The main lens, at least academically, of analyzing what was happening was populism, right? And it brought lots of things to light, which are undeniable—this idea that politics is the pure people versus a corrupt elite.
But also, the first observation was that a lot of these populist leaders are themselves a form of elite. They’re not just coming out of nowhere, right? Donald Trump was obviously not an established political elite, but he was still an elite of some description. If you go back to what Pareto was talking about earlier on, he’s undeniably part of the one percent. He was a media personality, particularly through The Apprentice, and he seized upon a new technological innovation, which was at the time Twitter, now X.
Is Donald Trump possible without social media? That’s debatable. And also in the United Kingdom—I mentioned Boris Johnson. He becomes one of the leaders of the Leave campaign to leave the European Union, which I would say is a populist, insurgency type of movement. But he’s as establishment as they come. He went to Eton—although admittedly, perhaps that’s the change. He didn’t study PPE at Oxford. He studied classics. But he hasn’t come out of nowhere.
So, that was to start off the observation. I’m not denying the populism stuff, but thinking another way about what’s happened in the last 10 years is that there are certain established politicians in the United States from the Left and the Right that have been challenged by this insurgent economic and subsequently political elite and they’ve been more or less overthrown by it. Trump 2024 marks quite a big break compared to what [came] before.
Obviously, in 2024, he was also able to bring the tech bros over to his side. That’s quite a change. He has his whole new group of people he brings into the administration. A lot of them are not at all conventional politicians. So, it’s a huge change. In the United Kingdom, it’s slightly different because the Conservatives remained in power for so long, but there’s still quite a lot of change.
So, that was the first observation. I do want to integrate populism, as you were suggesting, as one way in which circulation can occur. Obviously, you might also have a more regular circulation through elections and these types of things.
Then we have to identify what type of challenges there are. A populist challenge is more of a challenge that’s an insurgent challenge, trying to change the political system as such. So you have to code it differently or link it differently than if it was a more regular political party.
You might also say populists perhaps think about politics and rule in a different way than conventionals. But it is within the broader story of democracy. I do see it as part of the broader story of democracy. It’s just that if we have this elite perspective, we have to think about it slightly differently.
Pareto’s foxes and lions
KLUTSEY: Yes, and there’s an interesting framing, I think maybe by Pareto, about the foxes and the lions. Who actually are the foxes, and who are the lions in this context?
DROCHON: Yes, that’s the final piece of the puzzle. Perhaps that allows us to make more sense. This is why these thinkers are sometimes described as being Machiavellians, because the reference here is back to Machiavelli’s The Prince, where he famously says that the ideal prince is a combination of a fox and a lion. You need to be a lion because you need to be strong enough to scare off the wolves trying to take you down. But you also need to be a fox so you can avoid the traps that the lion might fall into. I don’t know why he thinks the lion wouldn’t be able to avoid a trap. It’s pretty anti-lion, I think. So that was the ideal. You need to be able to do both.
Pareto sees that. So, there is an elite. But sometimes the elite is going to be more lion-like or sometimes it’s going to be a bit more fox-like. These are obviously tendencies and sentiments. The idea is that the history of humankind, what he calls the circulation of elites—sometimes the lions are in power and sometimes the foxes are in power.
Depending on which one you have in power, it does have huge consequences for politics and society as a whole. If the lions are in power, then rule is considered to be more centralized, more willing to use force, and more faith-based. Whereas foxes are more about the sentiment that animates fox-like rule. According to Pareto, it’s combinazione. It’s about combination, compromise, skepticism, and being less willing to use force. That has an impact throughout society as a whole.
One of the suggestions I make in the book is that maybe post-war—we’ve spoken a lot about the Washington Consensus and the Cold War period—maybe that period was characterized by a form of fox-like rule, where a lot of it was about compromise and international institutions, compromise at the level of NATO and the UN. It’s quite revealing, I think, that all these so-called populist leaders absolutely hate the European Union, because the European Union is the quintessential fox-like project, right? So we don’t do power politics anymore.
KLUTSEY: Right.
DROCHON: We do compromise and these types of things.
So, liberal internationalism looks a bit fox-like. There’s an openness to free trade, et cetera. So they’re fox-like, perhaps. And now the lions are back in charge, right? It’s about force, no international institutions, faith-based politics, and much more centralization of rule.
If you think about the US context, the idea that you have a presidency that’s all-powerful, or at least theorized as such. So you have quite a change. One of my suggestions is that maybe the lions are back in power.
And if I can add to that, going back to the populism point, for Pareto, these two sentiments—and he has lots of other sentiments, but to keep it clean, these are the main two—he says, obviously, these are tendencies. So it’s never all one or the other, but there’s tendencies both at the elite level and at the regular level or people level. There’s an interaction between the two. The elite might be dominated by one sentiment, but that might not necessarily match the sentiment of the people. So you have changes within the two spheres, if that makes sense.
Normally, how this resolves itself, if it’s resolved in the correct ways, is that you have a small circulation of elites. Taken from Machiavelli, they all like river metaphors. So with the circulation of elites, you have a river and tributaries, and it all comes together nicely, et cetera. But also sometimes you have storms. The rivers break their banks. So sometimes you have reform and sometimes you have revolution.
And all of them, Mosca and Pareto in particular, and Michels a bit, too, were worried. Their ideal was an idealized 19th century English gentry, which was an open elite that was able to take the cream off the top and bring the best elements into it. That remained their ideal. So movement is a good thing. They do sometimes worry that too much movement can lead to instability, but they’re also worried about what they call crystallization, which is that the elite becomes too closed and is not bringing in sufficient or enough renewal or replenishment.
Maybe one way of thinking about the United States is precisely that there wasn’t enough renewal going on. I think Samuel Moyn has a book coming out called Gerontocracy, right? It’s the old who rule. And if you think until Kamala Harris came along, if it had been Trump and Biden, both would have been over 70 years old or more. How representative are they still of the US population as a whole? Maybe there’s too much of a difference between the two.
Here, maybe there’s too much crystallization, and the sentiments of the rulers were so divorced from the sentiments of the people. And again, these are just tendencies, but maybe we’re supposed to instead of having the usual reproduction, it became so stark that there was more of a revolt. People who felt that they hadn’t been within the Cold War, Washington Consensus types, they hadn’t been sufficiently heard or represented, then turned to these anti-establishment forces because they felt that the establishment wasn’t taking on sufficiently their point of view. Therefore, we move to a system where it’s not just slow churn, but more of a revolt and a complete takeover, which looks a bit more like Trump. It’s more of a complete takeover than it is a small amalgamation.
Elite competition for renewal
KLUTSEY: Yes. Is that why elite competition is always better than elite cooperation? Because with competition, there’s always renewal that is advanced, and then you have the interests of the masses that are taken up by the leading contender to advance those ideas.
DROCHON: Absolutely. If I can bring in another figure who appears in the book, it’s Raymond Aron, who, in the US context at least, is known for international relations. He was close enough to Henry Kissinger, and they had a lot of exchanges. In the context of the Cold War again, he’s trying to make a distinction between Western democracies and Eastern democracies. Obviously, Eastern Europe and Russia also claimed to be democracies. They claimed to be true Marxist democracies, not liberal bourgeois democracies.
So he’s trying to say, how do we characterize this? He explicitly says we should start from the fact that there are oligarchies. But one of the big differences is whether the elite is divided or whether it’s united. If you take all societal elites, political, economic, and social, are they in their own respective spheres with their own respective foundations of power? Are they put within a system that may be codified, constitutional, and transparent? Or are they all in the same institution, namely the Communist Party?
If the political, social, and economic elites are all in the same party, in that instance, the divided elite is better for two reasons. One is it guarantees more security for the population at large, because should one elite in the divided elites come after you, then maybe you can turn to another elite and say, “These people are after me. Can you counter them and protect me a bit?” Whereas in the Eastern system, if the Communist Party comes after you, you’ve nowhere to turn.
And to bring Machiavelli back into it again—this has become a bit of a mini discussion about Machiavelli. We spoke about Machiavelli’s The Prince. One of his other famous works is the Discourses, where he talks about the ancient Roman Republic before Julius Caesar takes over. There, he famously says what he calls the tumult, or the conflict between the patricians and the plebs, the nobles and the people.
For Machiavelli, it’s that conflict which opens up a space for liberty. It’s through the conflict that liberty can be found, and that’s where liberty and freedom within the Roman Republic were guaranteed. I think Aron wants to say the same thing, and I would like to say the same thing. It’s that there’s a possibility of conflict that opens up a space for freedom. So with divided elites there’s a possibility of freedom which is not really available in the divided elites. [sic]
Although, again, this is always on a continuum. Too much division also leads to instability, et cetera. There’s a juste milieu, a golden mean here to be found. In general, the thought is to push toward more movement, to more circulation, because circulation allows for the possibility of change. And within that possibility of change, then you may have the possibility of trying to push toward more inclusion, bringing more people in, maybe more redistribution, too. Those are the ways I’d try to characterize that.
Max Weber’s charisma and political maturity
KLUTSEY: Now, one of the very interesting points in the book to me, and maybe in some ways it’s a bit subtle, comes from Robert Michels, who says that “charisma is the only way to overcome the iron law of oligarchy.”
I just had a conversation with Molly Worthen, who wrote the book Spellbound, which is about the role of charismatic leaders in shaping American history from the 17th century to the present day. It’s quite remarkable the ways in which charisma can move and shift social movements, and I think it plays a key role in thinking about “dynamic democracy” in the way you’ve described it.
DROCHON: Yes, and that’s a very interesting conversation because it could break different ways, too. Obviously, this is the conversation he’s having with Max Weber at the time. Unfortunately, with Michels, he thinks that the only way to completely overcome this iron law of oligarchy, this bureaucratic iron law of oligarchy that he’s diagnosed, is to have a direct link between the people and the leader. But he meant that then as a defense of Mussolini, and I think that’s good to keep in mind in terms of the challenges of charisma.
Some people think the answer is just to get rid of it altogether and have a direct link with a charismatic leader. But that’s populism, right? And that has its challenges, too.
Max Weber actually had a slightly more nuanced view. He changed his tune over his own career and lifespan, but at a certain point the combination is that you need, yes, a charismatic leader, and you need what he calls the machine, or the political institution. It’s the combination of the two that is ideal. You don’t want either the political machine dominating the politician or you don’t want the charismatic leader who doesn’t have a machine. You need both.
I hope that has some links to what I was saying about “dynamic democracy,” too, which is that you need these three elements. Yes, you need a social movement, which could indeed be led by a charismatic leader, and you need these things for the possibility of change. But there are dangers in that, too. That’s why I said that democracy is a regime of uncertainty. You need change, but ideally you still have this mediating institution, which has traditionally been political parties. So you need those three elements: the social movement applying pressure, the elite or part of it that breaks off, and the political institution.
Ultimately, if you remember, Max Weber spoke within the context of more ideological politics in Europe at the time in the lead up to World War I then into World War II. There were socialists, fascists, communists, and liberals. It was much more ideological in some ways than perhaps it might be today. Within that, he spoke about the ethics of conviction, the politician who’s all about the ideal and would do anything to get to the ideal, and the ethics of politician, which is more about the apparatchik, the person who works within the institution. He says you need a bit of both. You need to have the ideal, but also the responsibility, because otherwise it can lead to disaster depending on which way it goes. Either nothing happens with the responsible politician, you might just get the status quo. But with a charismatic leader who’s willing to do anything to achieve their end point—if you think about what communist or fascist leaders were willing to do to achieve their ideal society, that results in millions of deaths—that’s problematic, too.
The key term Max Weber has at the end is political maturity. He wants somebody to have the experience to combine the two, which Michels doesn’t have as much. I think that’s still important for us today. So charisma plays an undeniable role, but it has to be tempered by other elements. Otherwise, it can also lead to problems. And indeed, without charisma, we don’t have the possibility of change either. So again, all of this is about thinking on a continuum rather than in dichotomies, like charisma or no charisma, machine or no machine. That combination of these things gives us the ideal outcome that we want. All of them have advantages and disadvantages, but we have to think about how to bring them all together.
Resilience amidst the uncertainty of democracy
KLUTSEY: Yes, and in some ways, trying to tie this into the theme of the podcast, which is about resilience, by resilience I mean the ability to adapt, to innovate, to absorb challenges, shocks, and to bounce back even stronger. It seems to me that what you’re saying is that there’s a real opportunity for addressing challenges within society, improving, and innovating, when this competition is happening, because the competition allows us to take up some really important ideas to move the republic forward.
DROCHON: Absolutely. That’s a criticism of crystallization. If it becomes static as opposed to dynamic, then nothing new happens, and it becomes stagnant. It’s through movement, through dynamism, that you actually get change and the possibility of change. Of course, with change, you never know exactly what you’re going to get. Maybe it’ll be worse, but it opens up the possibility and keeps the dynamism going.
We haven’t spoken too much about Mosca, but if I can bring Mosca into it, he says that if you look at human history, there’s always what equals new social forces that come into existence: changes in the economy, technological change, or changes in ideas, whatever you want to call it. Maybe today we might say, “Look, we’ve had massive technological and economic changes. We have social media and the internet, which are technological innovations.” Now we have AI. These are massive technological innovations that have an impact on the economic sphere, too, and ultimately they have an impact on the political sphere.
It’s hard to predetermine which way this is going to go. When social media first came out, everybody said it was wonderful, a tool for democracy. It seems to have helped certain revolts, especially in North Africa. People also said that the Obama administration used it really well. And then we might say X today has become something else, perhaps a bit more authoritarian, more conspiratorial, et cetera. So it’s hard to know which way this is going to go.
That’s one of the things we say about democracy. Against other forms of regimes, democracy is uncertainty. What’s important about democracy is that you don’t know what will happen, but within that uncertainty is the possibility of change.
Mosca always thought that there were all these social forces, and the question will be what is going to be the relationship between these new social forces and the established social forces. One of the challenges of the ruling class, as he put it, was to integrate these social forces in such a way that would benefit society as a whole.
He was at the time—maybe this goes to your point about resilience—a constitutional monarchist, so he did think there was a role for the king. But he did think the constitution was very important, and he also had a juridical, lawyerly background. He has this term, which he calls juridical defense. What he means by that is the rule of law, representative government, and pluralism. That was the best regime under which you could have as many social forces as possible.
In fact, this language is perhaps a little dated for us now, but in the 19th century you can judge levels of civilization. Those civilizations are able to integrate more social forces and are richer than those where you have less.
Mosca made his final speech in the senate at the end of his life denouncing Mussolini, because fascism wanted to take over all political power and wanted to reorganize not just politics but all facets of society, the economy, judiciary, army, everything, along fascist ideals. He said, “No, that’s not a good idea. That’s exactly what I’m against because that goes against pluralism. And that means it’s a new social force. Undeniably, it’s a new idea, it’s a new social force.” That social force then becomes tyrannical because it oppresses all the others, whereas the real challenge is that social forces live in plurality. That’s the richness of civilization.
So I think that hopefully speaks to the movement, circulation, and resilience of a regime, with the possibility that we’re not entirely sure. But that’s what’s great in some ways.
The next elite group to come
KLUTSEY: As we wrap up, I’d like you to ponder where you see the next elite group emerging. I know you’re not a forecasting person. You’re a political theorist. But given your framework and the ways in which you’re thinking about elites and democracy, what are you seeing when you peek around the corner? What’s emerging?
DROCHON: Do you mean this in the US context or worldwide?
KLUTSEY: Broadly speaking, yes, worldwide.
DROCHON: I think the most interesting thing right now, if we want to be slightly responsive to the news cycle, is what’s happening in Hungary. That’s a really interesting test case because, in some ways, Magyar is the classic combination of what I’ve spoken about. He was a Fidesz internal guy. He broke with the regime because of all these corruption charges. In fact, he divorced his wife, who had rubber-stamped the pardon of somebody who had covered up some pedophilic scandals in schools in Hungary. There are massive social movements that appeared, and he took the lead of those social movements and created his own political party. So he has those three elements, and he’s won a resounding victory against Orbán, which is very interesting. I don’t think that necessarily means that the so-called illiberal populist wave has come to an end, but these are the challenge points.
And he has done that while remaining policy-wise relatively conservative. He’s a center-right politician. He’s even said he’d be stronger on immigration than Orbán has been so far, while at the same time signaling a want to return to the European Union mainstream, support Ukraine, and do these types of things. That’s very interesting to see how he manages to change things, or not. He’s going to Poland in the first instance, because Donald Tusk has won also, but is having difficulties trying to change the regime.
So these are the questions about rising elites challenging established elites. But that’s only the beginning of the story. Do the established elites remain so entrenched that it’s impossible to get rid of them? Or do they overreach in getting rid of them completely, and therefore you get instability or a regime that changes too much and loses its stability? Right now, that’s an interesting pressure point in these debates. There are other ones, but that’s one example to help us think about them.
KLUTSEY: Well, Hugo, thank you for joining us. The book is Elites and Democracy by Hugo Drochon. A wonderful, insightful book. Grab a copy. Thank you.
DROCHON: Thank you very much.
